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It looked great on paper, but I found 500 Days of Summer dull and flat. It replaced plot with narrative trickery and effective characterisation with set-pieces stolen too blatantly from other films (this was good, but it was nothing on this).

I was also slightly irritated by the overall theme, but I think that was just because the dynamic was reversed - ie. in this case it was happening to the bloke. When I thought about it, every romantic comedy I’ve seen in the last few years (more than I care to admit) has had pretty much the same motif. Hollwood rom-coms have stopped doing “rags to riches”: their big transformation is now “shy to confident”.

Susie Scott’s excellent book Shyness and Society, a sociological study of shyness, suggests why this might be the case. Scott argues that shyness is something people have always experience, but that only we have chosen to stigmatise:

It is only since the late twentieth century that shyness has been defined as a failure to assert oneself, to be in touch with one’s feelings and to “be all that you can be”.

The renowned psychologist Phillip Zimbardo’s shyness.com is a classic example of this approach. Its homepage assures us that:

Shyness and social phobia do not have to interfere with achieving professional and interpersonal goals.

The assumption is that shyness is a bad thing - and that confidence is normal.

One consequence of this, Scott says, is that we feel increasingly anxious about our shyness. We feel strongly the demand to be poised, skillful and assertive in our dealings with others, and we are ashamed how little we are “really” like this. As a result, we all secretly feel as if we are faking it.

Where did the demand to be confident come from? Scott pinpoints modern culture:

In many ways, the shy person represents the complete anathema of contemporary Western culture’s “ideal” worker: by appearing to reject the go-getting, team-building, you-can-do-it ethos of the modern office, they pose a silent threat to the goals of an efficient, streamlined service economy and the exploitation of human resources.

Which brings us right back to 500 Days of Summer. Reader, he gets the job.

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